SiPearl – A New Contender For AMD and Intel Arrives

ARM has been shaking things up in the computing market space recently. And there is yet another reason for AMD and Intel to worry, with the arrival of a new rival. We recently covered news regarding Apple’s move from intel to their own custom ARM chip for their next Macbook.

There has also been a wave of ARM on the Windows-powered devices with a rise in Always connected laptops. So blows are being traded to x86 CPUs and its manufacturers from all sides. Courtest to AnandTech comes the news of new French-based company going by the name of ‘SiPearl’ who has recently signed a licensing deal with ARM for their next-generation tech.

Not only have the SiPearl signed a licensing deal with ARM they have also secured the backing and funding from European commission’s (EC) European Processor Initiative (EPI). The next-generation tech from ARM is called Neoverse. And the processor that is going to utilize this tech is codenamed Zeus.

The Mighty ‘Zeus’

Zeus will essentially act as a successor to the Neoverse N1 ‘Ares’ being used by Amazon for their Graviton2. Interestingly ‘Ares’ is going to be the same infrastructure that is going to power Cortex A-77 cores. The ‘Zeus’ platform which includes ARM’s POP IP on FinFET2 will allow for some high performance and efficient computing. The POP IP also allows the processors to sustain higher clock speeds.

SiPearl expects to roll out their first generation of processors to in 2022 which will power Europe’s exascale HPC ambitions. There is a detailed road-map put out by the EC on the EPI’s website which you can check out below.

Road-map by European Commission

We can notice that there is a mention of ‘N6’ which means these chips will be built on the TSMC’s advanced N6(6nm) nodes. We also covered how the AMD Zen 4 chips are going to be fabricated on an exclusive N5P node from TSMC.

Although there doesn’t seem to be an immediate threat to Intel and AMD, at least to their HPC and consumer level processors. It might not be long before they are challenged in those segments too and hence can’t afford to be complacent.

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